Hammered Lines

Dawn came to Harlow Junction like an old promise—slow and stubborn. The sun rolled up over the low ridges, painted the corrals a raw orange, and set the iron in Silas Hollis’s forge to sweating. Etta Mae Hollis stood with her sleeves rolled and her palms dusted in coal, listening to the morning the way some men listened to trains. The hammer's rhythm was a small, private law: up, down, ring. Up, down, ring. Sparks flicked like impatient fireflies and landed on the packed earth, and the smell of hot steel and spent coal filled her nose until she could taste it.

Her hands were not pretty. Knuckles knotted, nails cracked, lines of small white scars ran like maps across the pads of her fingers. She liked them that way. She liked that the skin on her palms told where she'd been and what she'd done. She'd learned the basics at eleven, when her mother had tucked her into the corner of the shop and taught her to temper a nail without flinching. At twenty-two, she ran the bellows while her father took on the heavier work—an arrangement that suited both of them. Silas was a broad-shouldered man with the patience of weathered rock. He spit tobacco and whistled off-key as he coaxed the metal into shapes; his laugh came in slow lumps, but it came.

Outside the shop, Harlow Junction rubbed sleep from its eyes. A wooden platform, the size of a small stage, sagged beside the single-track line that cut the town. The depot was little more than a lean-to and a telegraph box that chirped with the town’s gossip. There were ten clapboard buildings in a half-moon: a livery, a saloon with a sagging sign that read RUTH’S—if you squinted the R looked like it had been painted by someone who wanted to forget sins—and a barber whose mirror had long ago been cracked by a thrown hat. Beyond the town, the land fell away into plains and then rose into the sweep of the railroad cut—steel slicing the horizon like a promise or a threat, depending on who you asked.

Etta ran a rag along a newly forged horseshoe and wiped grit from her fingertips. Coal, her mutt, nosed the door and nosed the heat, then pushed his way inside and curled at her feet. Brass, her mare, stamped quietly outside, steam wreathing her nostrils. Other people came to the forge for horseshoes and pails and the occasional stubborn hinge, and Etta took each request with the same steady attention—listen, measure, shape, fit. She had been careful to learn the town’s quiet skill of listening; if you let people talk, they'd hand you answers without knowing it.

That morning, a boy from the livery trotted in, cheeks flushed, and stuck out a scrap of paper as if it were a found leaf. "Tommy says they want a new sign on the depot," he said, voice thin with the excitement of a boy who liked things that moved.

Silas glanced over and hummed. "Railroad’s sending a man through next week. Might be good business."

Etta felt that little pull behind her breastbone—always a small rope of worry when the rail came into conversation. The railroad was a machine of iron and promise, but it came with men who made choices for other people's land. Harlow Junction had changed slowly since the spikes started to dig into the earth two years back. Some houses had shutters nailed down with new, straight nails, others had new boards altogether. The saloon's piano had stopped limping and started to brag. And still, water ran just where it always had, and the well creaked with the same tired wheel, and people went about their mornings.

When the train whistle called twelve hours later, Etta paused between hammer strikes and listened. The sound was a long, hungry animal calling from the east, and when it passed the town the dust it kicked up settled like a new layer of skin over the main street. She did not yet know that the sound carried news that would make the hair on the back of the town's neck stand up.